Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves? Listening to migrant domestic workers’ everyday temporalities

Abstract

This essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human trafficking and labour abuse. Simultaneously victimising and venerating workers, I argue that both terms spectacularise experiences of migrant domestic work, untethering it from lived, material conditions. In so doing, the everyday nature of exploitation and abuse encountered by many migrant domestic workers is obscured, as well as the everyday expertise that enables them to evade, de-escalate, and survive it. Through making collaborative soundwalks with migrant domestic workers—a creative form similar to site-specific audio guides—my research identifies ways in which performance methodologies can be attentive to the specific temporalities of their lived experiences and to their decisions about self-representation.

Theorising human trafficking through slow violence

“…As Grizzell and I argue, ‘The violence of trafficking is commonly not one of immediacy, not the moment of exchange, but rather a series of processes, systemic structures, and relations between people that take place over long periods of time’ (Schwarz and Grizzell, 2020: 20). The false security of these seemingly closed cases, the successful raid followed by an equally successful rescue, ignores the slow violence of life post trafficking (Brennan, 2014): the gradual slide into financial precarity induced by tracking trafficking survivors into low-wage labour, the accretive layers of legal tenuousness for undocumented survivors or survivors with pre-existing felony charges, the everyday violence of living under systemic inequality (Plambech, 2014) that is typically not viewed as violence at all .…”

“…Or, as Butler states, 'Simply put, life requires support and enabling conditions in order to be livable life ' (2009: 21). I think about the supportive conditions induced through an increased minimum wage (Rushe, 2021); improved labour rights for workers in the global economy (Parry-Davies, 2020;Quirk et al, 2020); accessible, affordable and available housing (Fukushima et al, 2020); healthcare for all without the threat of medical debt (Snyder et al, 2016); defunded police departments with redistributed funds to other community resources (Davis, 2003;Vitale, 2017;Kaba, 2020); education without a pipeline to prison (Meiners, 2010;Annamma, 2018); social work systems outside of carceral enmeshments (Jacobs et al, 2021); decriminalising sex work (Mac and Smith, 2018;Robinson and Chin, 2020) and drug use (Earp et al, 2021); demilitarised migration (Miller and Baumeister, 2013) more aligned with a 'No Borders' politic (Anderson et al, 2009); reparations (Taylor, 2019;Lutz, 2020); and Indigenous land repatriation (ICT Staff, 2012;Tuck and Wayne Yang, 2012). None of these suggestions are quick or easy; there are conflicted viewpoints across and beyond partisan binaries that shape each of these policy interventions.…”

“…Polaris Project uses the language of accumulating harms that implies an element of time or temporality, referencing the vulnerabilities of youth aging out of foster care or the simultaneity of evictions, job loss and COVID-19. Unlike the ‘master narrative’ of trafficking that emphasises spectacle and capture through state intervention (Hill, 2016), Polaris Project is more aligned here with the theorising of trafficking as a continuum of less-sensationalised harms (Chapkis, 2003; Plambech, 2014; Schwarz et al, 2019) that is more readily accessible in critical trafficking studies. As I have previously explored with my co-author Trevor Grizzell, the ‘compressive violence’ of human trafficking narratives that favour flashy, instantaneous capture fail to recognise the elements of build-up and accumulation that may in fact enact harms: ‘The violence of trafficking is commonly not one of immediacy, not the moment of exchange, but rather a series of processes, systemic structures, and relations between people that take place over long periods of time, a sort of slow violence’ (Schwarz and Grizzell, 2020: 74).…”